Kaspersky: Great product, dreadful installation/upgrade process

Evan Schuman |
Sept. 16, 2015

All companies need to pay more attention to the experience that ordinary users have when they try to install new products and upgrades.

Tech support eventually concluded that I had seen the wrong key. Can they fix that? Nope, I was told by multiple tech support people. The sales team are the only people that can fix that. I was then transferred to sales. Most readers can guess what happened after a long wait in the sales queue: Sales said that they can’t help, but that tech support could. I then told sales that tech support said the opposite. Back I went to tech support. Rinse, wash, repeat.

My effort to get tech support and sales to agree to a conference call were unsuccessful. Eventually — that means five calls later — I was able to get someone in tech support to agree to try to fix the issue. Several hours later, I received an email that said, “You can now go ahead and try to reactivate your Kaspersky. We have already reset the activation code.” I did so, and the system seemed happy. Until we tried installing it on the second computer and the problem returned. Entertainingly, even the first computer was now saying that it was deactivating protections because we had exceeded the number of devices.

Software companies, of course, need to make their products powerful and effective. But if the installation and upgrade process is not made simple, problems are going to result. This is where you make your money. Please test it regularly and use external testers. And force them to get answers from the regular tech support team, accessed through normal channels. You’ll learn that there’s a lot more to software sales than the product itself.